According to the latest report, TSMC’s revenue contribution from HPC in the first quarter reached 41%, surpassing mobile phones for the first time and becoming the largest source of revenue, symbolizing the official arrival of the HPC era, and the market is optimistic.
Pushing up the HPC supply chain, the back-end design services such as Creative, Schip-KY, and the derived high-speed transmission interface demand, the growth momentum will be booming at the same time.
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According to the industry, HPC is a high-standard computing performance that can process a large amount of data at high speed, which is an operation that cannot be processed by ordinary personal computers, especially with high bandwidth, high performance, and low power consumption. It needs to handle more real-time operations and reduce power consumption through advanced packaging methods.
Taiwanese factories such as Chuangyi and Shixin-KY have cooperated with TSMC for a long time, and cooperate with its advanced wafer process and advanced packaging platform to develop their own IP and provide back-end design services for customers who want to enter the HPC field. Chuangyi launched a 2.5, 3D Advanced Packaging Technology (APT) platform that can effectively shorten the customer ASIC design cycle, reduce risk and improve yield.
Among them, the creative HBM (high bandwidth memory) mainly cooperates with the CoWoS process. With the increase in HPC production, the related performance also grows at the same time. It is optimistic that HBM3 will usher in an explosive year this year, and GLink is a 3DIC-based platform. Contribution to revenue, driving the doubling of IP performance throughout the year.
Moreover, Shixin also continues the technology in the FinFET architecture, provides its own D2D APLink IP and subsystem integration services to customers, and also focuses on 5nm cases. It is expected that the revenue contribution from 5nm will increase significantly this year.
In addition, as data needs to be processed at high speed, high-speed transmission interface business opportunities are also derived. Taiwanese manufacturers, including Pray-KY, Xiangshuo, etc., have also launched USB4-related products one after another, with the growth of the overall market.
According to a previous report by Digitimes, both AMD and Nvidia are confident in the sales prospects of their high-performance computing GPUs and CPUs, despite the uncertainty surrounding the post-epidemic economic recovery, prompting them to place orders for 2022 to supply Chain partners have increased by at least 30% to ensure customers have sufficient shipments.
Furthermore, TSMC will be the biggest beneficiary of this. On the one hand, AMD is asking TSMC to add more 7/6/5nm process capacity for its new products, as supply constraints will ease quarter by quarter in 2022 after ABF carrier boards affected its shipments in 2021.
In the past two years, AMD’s CPU and GPU market share in servers, laptops, and desktops has increased significantly, and gaming chip shipments have also increased significantly. The company’s annual revenue in 2021 is expected to grow 60% year over year to $15.6 billion, according to sources, and the growth could have been even higher had it not been for the shortage of ABF carrier boards.
For further growth in 2022, AMD will significantly increase TSMC’s 7nm and 6nm manufacturing orders, in addition to increasing orders with back-end partners and ABF carrier board suppliers, and will use the 5nm process for its manufacturing, the sources said new products, further increasing its revenue contribution to pure-play foundries.
On the other hand, Nvidia has decided to use TSMC’s 5nm process for its next-generation Ada lovelace-based RTX 40-series GPUs in 2022, sources said. With the return of Nvidia’s orders, the revenue and gross profit margin of TSMC’s 5nm high-performance computing platform will soar quarter by quarter next year.
The source also noted that many of Nvidia’s other supply chain partners have received good news, and their orders from Nvidia could double in 2022, given the strong shipments of its GPUs for data center servers, gaming, and crypto mining applications.
Market sources estimate that TSMC’s revenue in 2022 will increase by more than 15% year-on-year, due to significant increases in shipments to Apple, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Intel, as well as higher quotations.
